as the chamber would allow. She could see things squirming just under the surface of his skin, wonnlike creatures, crawling at high speed. Her first thought was that they had to be some kind of rad-mutated internal parasite. The smell of him in the enclosed space made her head spin. Not just rank and cheesy after the normal fashion of Deathlands, but fishy and putrid like the stickies he was always stroking so fondly. Krysty wasn’t exactly sure what she was doing in the chamber or how she had gotten there, but she knew that she and Jak were in great danger
“Jak! Jak!” she whispered.
The teenager had his forehead pressed to the floor and was trying to puke up meals he’d eaten a week ago. He was in no condition to help.
Then Krysty saw the neon-colored M-60 lying on the gateway floor. There were no other weapons visible in the chamber, so she grabbed it It was very heavy, and she couldn’t hope to lift it, along with the attached belt of linked 7.62 mm cartridges, without a surge of Gaia powers. She had only just found the safety and moved it from Safe to Fire and was looking for something to prop the barrel on when a huge hand gripped the barrel and gently but firmly took the machine gun away from her.
“You shouldn’t play with that, Angelica,” Kaa said to her. “Joyeuse bites.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ryan stood sentry along with Doc outside the redoubt’s armory. Inside, J.B. and Mildred were trying to open the vanadium safe that housed the armory’s baby nuke. They had been at it for what seemed like a long time.
“Tough nut to crack, eh?” Doc said.
“Mebbe impossible,” Ryan agreed.
Way down the long hallway they guarded, a shadowy, skinny-limbed figure darted from one doorway to another. The flickering of the overhead fluorescent lighting created a kind of stop-action, strobe effect. Ryan braced his caseless autorifle against the armory’s doorjamb and sighted across the hall from where he had last seen the stickie. With the bad light and the short distance between the doorways, a trap lead was the only way to score consistently.
A trap lead and a triburst
He had learned that the hard way.
When the stickie bolted from the door to his left, Ryan tightened his finger on the trigger. His smooth, steady pull ended when the trigger broke and the autorifle bucked against his shoulder. The triple shot caught the stickie high in the chest and sent it sprawling on its back in the hall. The stickie wasn’t alone there. In
the half hour J.B. had been sweating over the safe’s security system, Doc and Ryan had dropped eight or ten stickles as they tried, rather clumsily, to sneak up on them.
“I do believe that puts you one ahead, my dear Ryan,” Doc said, shaking his gun hand to loosen up the muscles.
“Bingo!” a voice said behind them. J.B. had finally sprung the safe.
“Stay on the door. Doc/* Ryan said as he entered the armory. J.B. and Mildred were staring at the open door of the safe. Both of them were grinning. “How’d you do it?” Ryan said.
“Just got lucky, I guess.”
“He had about a zillion connections wired up,” Mildred said. “He cross-rigged the card sensors somehow.”
“Feedback loop,” J.B. corrected her. “It takes a while but it works every time.”
“Have we got a nuke in there?” Ryan said.
J.B. reached into the half-height doorway and rolled out a fat, gleaming silver cylinder, bristling with electronic do-dads, keypads and readouts. The nuke had its own little wheeled gurney, complete with tool rack and ops manual. “This was thoughtful,” J.B. said, flipping through die loose-leaf notebook. “Hey, it’s a twenty-five kiloton model. Crater city.”
“How much longer till we can make the jump?” Ryan asked him.
“It’ll take me fifteen to twenty minutes to work through this checklist, if Mildred helps me.” “Sure,” she said. “Just tell me what you need.” “Get on it, then,” Ryan said.
IT TOOK PRECISELY eighteen minutes for J.B. to prep and fuse the baby nuke. When he punched in the last code sequence, the device gave off a series of high-pitched peeping noises, like an electronic chick desperate to find its mother.